Oh yeah! I remember that one too! But at least on the "B-2" page it was made clear from the start that it was an alternate storyline. Besides, the model was clearly inspired by the imaginings of Bill Gunston in his Osprey Warplanes series. Not so with the Specter. The story is so brilliantly written and the details so perversely accurate that many people fell for it at the time, me included! Congratulations.

Is anyone aware of someone having built a flying model of the Testors F-19 design? I would be really curious to know how it flew and what it's RCS was. Would be neat to look at these design concepts and see if any of them would have worked aerodynamically and from the "stealth" perspective.

Is anyone aware of someone having built a flying model of the Testors F-19 design?

...Not an R/C version, but I've seen a couple of scratchbuilt model rocketry versions over the years. Flew straight up pretty stable, but they weren't allowed to glide back down having a nose cone that popped off to allow the F-19 to dangle from a chute. ISTR some comments on another forum about 10 years ago or so about how a couple of old hands at Langley put the Testors kit through a wind tunnel with mixed results, but nothing I can pull up using Google-Fu, alas.

Pretty sure I saw an electric ducted - fan one on one of the R/C forum sites. IIRC it flew well... or so the designer / builder said! It looked rather nice and was a composite moulding. So long as it's built light enough and there's enough power, I can't imagine there would be a problem flying it, apart from the fin location which might make yaw stability a bit marginal.

Loral Aerospace commissioned a run of several dozen of these models in 1981 to promote its passive digital electronics suites to aerospace companies secretly designing stealthy aircraft and ships. People knew a stealth fighter (later revealed as F-117) was flying but didn't know its shape yet. Loral ordered two versions--silver and black. Loral CEO Bernard Schwartz was photographed with this on his desk. Fuselage length is about 15" and wingspan is 10". The deep black paint is finished with a very high gloss coat. All decals are perfect; only flaw on the model is a tiny paint chip. Stand is in excellent shape also, with some unobtrusive scratches on the bottom since it never had any pads.

Exact figures are classified, but loss of that radar absorbent material chip indeed degraded the monostatic RCS profile significantly at the Helendale range. As a result I decided to bring the entire F-19A Spector program out of the black world. First step was de-accessioning this model from its secure vault beneath Groom Lake. I am authorized to reveal that non-PayPal offers were immediately made by John Cashio; a mid-level apparatchik at Sukhoi; and an apparent animal rights group calling itself The Skunk Works. After careful study by the procurement team that managed the USAF tanker bids for a decade, I decided to instead offer it to the eBay model collector community, known to be notoriously secretive about the origins of its own assets. Thanks for a great laugh, chuckandconnie!

F-19s (Sweetman's/Badrocke concept, Loral concept based Monogram 1:48 model. and Testors model, too) made their appearance in 1988 spy comedy 'Zits' by Arthur Sherman with Ilya Baskin as russian spy Timoshenkoif you can borrow a copy on VHS (no DVD was ever released) you will spent some nice time back in 80s

I remember seeing plastic toy models of something like the Loral F-19 back in the late 80s-early 90s. They were sold at this yellow and stainless-steel monstrosity of a supermarket chain called The Real Superstore. They were nearly as garish: black with flourescent orange cockpit canopy, missiles, intakes, and exhaust!